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"I left with only one small bag, thinking I'd return to Syria after a short time," says the 53-year-old artist.

Art collector Hisham Samawi and his cousin Khaled Samawi, who run Ayyam Gallery in Dubai, helped Dahoul -- and later his paintings -- leave Syria.

The cousins first opened the gallery in Damascus in 2006, but the conflict had forced them to move the headquarters to Dubai around three years ago.

Between 2011 and 2013, the Samawis and their team helped more than a dozen Syrian artists relocate overseas, providing them with visas and airfare, and moved about 3,000 artworks to Dubai.

"The moment when trouble started happening in Syria, we decided that we needed to plan because if this thing turned ugly, we're not going to have time to do this later," says Hisham Samawi.

They also helped 33-year-old artist Tammam Azzam escape to Dubai in September 2011. His work "Freedom Graffiti" -- a digitally manipulated image of Gustav Klimt's painting "The Kiss" superimposed on a photograph of a bomb-ravaged wall in Syria -- went viral last year after the Saatchi Gallery in London shared it on Facebook.

"Freedom Graffiti," by Syrian artist Tammam Azzam, is a digitally created work featuring Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss."

Moving artists and their artworks to safe havens such as Beirut, Dubai and Cairo is a costly operation, but Samawi says it is worth it.

"We feel like we're a family in Ayyam," he says. "So it was never an option that we're going to cut our ties and move on."

But it's not just about rescuing Syrian artistic and cultural treasures, it's also about money. Middle Eastern art is big business, and Dubai is a hub, hosting the region's largest modern art fair.

On the first day of Art Dubai last month, Ayyam Gallery sold a "Dream" painting by Dahoul for $150,000.

"More and more, we're seeing people engage with artists who are producing work in conflict areas," says Bashar Al Shroogi, art collector and director of Dubai-based Cuadro Fine Art Gallery.

"It's because they have a message, it's because they're reflecting back what's happening in the regions. Essentially, they're holding a mirror back to society and saying, 'This is what's going on around me. Do you see what I see?"